In the Cut

As part of the Melbourne International Festival, the Australian Centre of Contemporary Art‘s In the Cut brings together 16 artists working across a broad range of collage techniques.

The selection of Australian and international work, curated by Associate CuratorHannah Mathews, is diverse, almost chaotic, drawn as it is from the last three decades, and its salon-style hang makes for a collage-like onslaught in the viewing. Cohesion comes from the medium’s historical and contemporary power, its rupturing and retelling of accepted narratives played over and over. The contemporary works also leave no doubt of collage’s continued relevance, with the insistent visuality and fractured notions of authorship that characterise the digital age seeming like a match made in heaven.

In both their direct political critique and in their evocation of surrealist dreamscape, a number of artists display a direct lineage to the Modernist photomontage of artists such as Hannah Höch and John Heartfield. British punk/post-punk performance artist Linder Sterling‘s found photographic nudes in Pretty Girls (1977-2007) are bestowed with fantastical heads of electrical appliances, demanding, with a startling directness and a jolt of black humour, we reread the female body. Likewise, Australian pop artist Richard Larter‘s 1980s artists books, mimic the conventions of true romance comics, imploding cultural norms with a hysterical larrikin mashup of found newspaper type, celebrity photographs, soft pornography and reproductions of old master paintings.

The use of vernacular images resurfaces in the contemporary girls-gone-wild decoupage technique of Lillian O’Neil, whose monumental three-panelled Attack of the Romance (2013) uses photographic images cribbed from books dating from the 1940s onwards, in unsettling, colour-saturated combinations that compress notions of time and place. In Scab (2009), Matthew Griffen works both with collage, using reproductions of reverential mid-century portraiture disrupted by generic ‘scabs’ of early commercial clipart, and with assemblage, creating ‘handcrafted’ frames from corrugated cardboard.

Henning Bohl’s Corner of A Cornfield (2010) may depart entirely from political impulse, and from his own use of figurative found images, but it nonetheless also subverts – this time the very conventions of painting, the work’s sculptural application of coloured paper redefining the relationship of surface and object.

The exhibitions was developed to complement and run simultaneously with the first international showing of Tacita Dean‘s acclaimed 2012 Tate Turbine Hall Commission Film, an homage to classic analogue cinema which also dwells on montage, transformation and the physicality of image production.